


Cinnamon

by Skinandpit



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Baking, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-28
Updated: 2012-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-31 20:34:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skinandpit/pseuds/Skinandpit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Fall, Sherlock keeps in touch with Molly. As he's terrible at small talk and they need to keep identifying information out of their correspondence anyway, she sends him recipes instead of conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cinnamon

Sherlock doesn’t eat on cases. Hunger is like a whetstone. He needs to keep his mind sharp enough to cut through the tangled webs of his cases.

After the fall, there is no detective work. He can’t afford for there to be. It is important to hide his brilliance, since he can’t yet be sure how many of Moriarty’s accomplices are looking for him.

Now that there’s no need to starve himself, he starts eating three meals a day. His body grows softer, which is disconcerting at first and strangely satisfying later.

\--

He sits by the dusty window of the flat he’s renting -- alone, this time -- and checks his e-mail. The light is very weak, and faintly blue from reflecting off the snow. He’s kept in contact with Molly.

 _I need you_ , he’d said, and he hadn’t been lying. Before John, he wouldn’t have had any problems cutting himself off from human company. Now, he considers her encrypted emails a worthwhile risk. They keep him sane.

He’d prefer to speak to John, but that can’t be done. They’re sure to be watching his blogger. Molly, on the other hand -- poor, forgettable Molly. To his enemies, she’s never been more than a pawn.

Because he’s still terrible at small talk and their emails must be devoid of identifying information anyway, she sends him recipes. He makes them, then writes her snarky reviews. She is fond of sugar and chocolate. Never having eaten for any reason other than necessity, he hasn’t got any preferences.

Snow piles up around his window. He is cold. He draws a blanket around his shoulders.

\--

Sherlock is sad sometimes and lonely often. Baking is barely a distraction, but it passes the time. Eating dulls his mind enough that living in it is nearly tolerable.

He’s very good at it. It’s exactly like chemistry except you get to eat the results.

Sherlock has never admitted this to anyone, but he’s not good at a lot of things. Board games, for example, confuse him, and he’s terrible at parallel parking. He’s marvelously clever but he doesn’t know a thing about the solar system. It’s nice to fall naturally into a talent.

His cupboards fill up with pastries and tarts and nanaimo bars. His clothes gain a permeant white-flour dust.

\--

 _He misses you,_ she writes, once, at the end of a recipe for nanaimo bars.

Sherlock stares at the screen for a full ten minutes before sending a response claiming that the email had been corrupted. He feels ill.

When she re-sends the email, her commentary has been removed.

\--

His favorites are the heavy cakes, the ones which fill him up and taste wonderful alongside tea. He discovers that he likes cinnamon and hates anything with lemon.

One day, he walks into a bakery and purchases a slice of marble cake. He sits down and eats it in front of a window, watching the snow sweep across the pavement in eddies and waves. He wears a hoodie to disrupt his silhouette, but doesn’t bother to hide his eyes.

When he’s done, he looks down at the empty plate, covered with scattered yellow crumbs. He thinks, _I could do a better job of that._

The thought fills him with a strange, startling pride.

\--

After the bakery shop, he drafts an email. It takes him twenty-six minutes to compose a single message: _I like the cinnamon apples. Which recipe do you prefer?_

It’s the first personal question he’s asked her, at least since his disappearance, and possibly ever.

She writes back with an exuberant list, every item of which he could have guessed, except for the toffee on account of it being incredibly salty and nearly unpalatable until he adjusted the recipe himself. She’s trying so hard that it’s almost alarming. He thinks he should be irritated, but he isn’t really. He’s starting to miss idle conversation.

After that, he sends her emails more often. If you wanted, and he is surprised to find that he does, you could call their correspondence a conversation.

\---

 

 _Where do you get these recipes?_ he e-mails Molly one day, on a whim. They don’t seem consistent enough to come from a single cookbook, and he knows she’s not on good enough terms with her parents for them to be a family recipe.

He is eating apple crumble when his computer pings. He brings the plate with him to the desk beside the window and strikes the spacebar to clear his screensaver.

It’s Molly. Of course it’s Molly. No one else contacts him.

He opens up her email. She writes in pink font, which he finds more annoying than endearing most days, but not all. Her signature always contains an inspirational message, which he ignores.

 _John’s a good cook,_ she’s written. _Mrs. Hudson has been teaching him, as something to do. I’ve asked him to forward his favorites to me._

Sherlock reads it three times. His heart is pattering.

It takes three tries to convince his hands to stay on the keyboard. They won’t stop shaking,

 _Tell him they’re appreciated_ , he writes. And then, all in a rush: _As are you, incidentally. I’d be lost without my baker._

He hits send before he can reconsider.

He feels light-headed. His mind swims with images of morgues, of midnight chases, of laughing in the streets of London and of the woman who spoke kindly to him even as the world was loosing faith.

He thinks it might be time to come home.

His mouth tastes of cinnamon.


End file.
